The Nature of the Universe

Questions

What can we possibly mean by "the nature of things" or the "nature of the universe"?

Why would we possibly care?

What does the word "nature" mean in this context?

What exactly is the universe? Is it everything? Is it just one of many universes?

How big is the universe? How many dimensions does it have?

Did the universe have a beginning? Does it even matter?

If it did begin, where did it come from?

Will the universe end? What does that even mean? Should we care?

What is time? What is space?

How do we discover the nature of things? Where do we look?

How do we know if we are right about what we discover?

How do we know anything at all?

Is there stuff we can't see or sense at all? If so, how do we know it's there?

Why is there something instead of nothing? Can there even be nothing?

What is real? Are you real? Am I real?

Why are we here? What is our purpose? How should we live?

Notice that these are called "Questions", and not "Great Questions".

We should not regard as great the questions that have been invented solely for the sake of eliciting puzzlement.
— Peter Atkins

Explorations

Others have considered these questions before, and continue to do so today.
What did they find out? How did they reason?

A lot of what has been discovered, what is known, and what is hypothesized, is captured in Wikipedia,
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, books, journals, audio and video recordings, and many other
places.

Let's start by looking at works intended for a general audience because
these do a good job of framing the questions and summarizing our current
knowledge (and lack of knowledge), as well as provide histories of philosophy and science.
Once comfortable with these issues, you can dive in to original sources and modern
scholarly works.

Content for a Popular Audience

How about an introduction to the universe, from a physical perspective, followed by some
more details on space and time? After all it's hard to get at what everything is without
considering space and time.

Michio Kaku's The Universe in a Nutshell

The Spacetime section at thebigview.com has
a collection of relatively short pages on relativity, time dilation, spacetime, quantum theory,
the Uncertainty Principle, and the universe.

A couple videos on relativity and quantum mechanics by Eugene Khutoryansky:

Cary Huang's Scale of the Universe, an interactive
exploration of the structures of the universe at various scales.
DO NOT MISS

A video showing the scale of the universe, that also hypothesizes a multiverse, as well as some
weird trippy imagined stuff at the small scale. Make of it what you want....

It seems that it's not just the things and the stuff of the universe that matters, but
also their organization and behavior:

The NOVA Science Now episode on emergence, shows that seemingly complex behaviors in nature such
as flocks of birds, schools of fish, or even crowds of people, simply emerge without there being
any recognizable leader. Might life, thought, and consciousness also be emergent properties?

And finally, might it be that the nature of things depends on observers? That is, us? If
so, what do we know about ourselves, our brains, our minds, reality, consciousness?

And... there are some great TED talks on the universe, physics, cosmology, and the human condition.
And tons of short videos on bigthink as well. Happy searching!

Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of
belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.

Pretty important. Science has built into it organized skepticism that comes from
a preference for theories that can in principle be falsified through repeated
experimentation. Science "advances" both from people making better measurements and
increasing our confidence in existing theories, as well as those that come up with
(radically) new explanations.

Regardless of what is said about science, there is something very compelling about it,
namely that it works. From Tyson and Goldsmith's Origins:

If you board an aircraft built according to science—with principles that have
survived numerous attempts to prove them wrong—you have a far better chance
of reaching your destination than you do in an aircraft constructed by the rules
of Vedic astrology.

...the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings,
and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and superstitions. Most of the
traditional causes of belief — faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom,
the invigorating glow of subjective certainty — are generators of error and should be dismissed as
sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate workarounds for our cognitive
limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often
requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture
opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or
imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.

Religion

Religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an
order of existence. Many religions have narratives, symbols, and sacred histories that are intended to explain the
meaning of life and/or to explain the origin of life or the Universe. From their beliefs about the cosmos and human
nature, people derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle. According to some estimates, there
are roughly 4,200 religions in the world.

Many religions may have organized behaviors, clergy, a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership,
holy places, and scriptures. The practice of a religion may also include rituals, sermons, commemoration or
veneration of a deity, gods or goddesses, sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trance, initiations, funerary services,
matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service or other aspects of human culture.
Religions may also contain mythology.

The word religion is sometimes used interchangeably with faith, belief system or sometimes set of duties;
however, in the words of Émile Durkheim, religion differs from private belief in that it is "something eminently
social". A global 2012 poll reports that 59% of the world's population is religious, and 36% are not religious.

So according to Wikipedia at least, religions that offer explanations of the origin of life or the origin
of the universe or the meaning of life do so through "narrative, symbols, traditions, and sacred histories."
And keep in mind, not all religions care about cosmic origins, nor do all religions care about
morality. Religions are social.

So does that mean religion is useless in the study of the nature of the universe? Partially, BUT:
Many great scientists have been members, and in fact clergy, of religious institutions.
And many religious institutions have wholeheartedly supported scientific inquiry.

Exercise: Research historical examples of religious institutions
both supporting and suppressing scientific inquiry.

Exercise: Research the proposition that the scientific enlightenment (which
continues to this day) could only have grown out of a monotheistic world view.

What can the non-religious adapt from religions, if anything? Some ideas from Alain de Botton:

Mysticism

"Mysticism" is another term that's hard to define. Basically, it's more about connecting with or experience
a kind of being or consciousness "beyond normal human perception" — so says
Wikipedia.

So mysticism isn't necessarily about answering the questions above; however, it can be
cool. Oh and note: mysticism can be religious or non-religious.

But what does it mean to be "beyond normal human perception"? If we can perceive it, then we can
measure and study it? Or can we? What do you make of the following?

The Meaning of Life, Wonder, and Awe

What can we say about the meaning (or the purpose?) of our existence? How is it related to our
sense of wonder or of awe?

Neil Tyson on knowledge of the cosmos (and a few other things):

Carl Sagan's famous quote "Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return.
And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the
cosmos to know itself."

Also check out Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. Several people have put his words in this work
to video; there a quite of few of these on youtube.

From The Feynman Series: Science adds to the beauty we can perceive:

And more from Feynman: The truth is so much more remarkable than the stories made up by people who
didn't know:

Now go watch a bunch of Jason Silva's videos. He has one
entitled The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck.

Kevin Simler has a small blog called Spirituality
of Science that "celebrates science and wonder." Perhaps there are a few entries of interest.

Exercise: View some slideshows from the Hubble Space Telescope. Study, then reflect, on the XDF.

Exercise: What awes you?

Exercise: Take "debate notes" for both sides of the following: "RESOLVED: The awe we can experience by reflecting on the universe in the context of our (scientific) understanding of the cosmos and of ourselves surpasses any kind of spiritual awe generated by participation in religious rituals."

Methods of Inquiry

What tools do we have in our search for answers? We have the three pillars of
scientific inquiry:

Theory

Experimentation

Computation

Computation is a (relatively) recent addition to this list. The powerful computation
available to us today makes available to us knowledge that we could never simply observe
with our eyes or work out with pencil-and-paper mathematical reasoning: it is qualitatively
different that what we could know before. See
Chapter 7 of the book
Science at the Frontier, as well as
Peter Denning's Great Principles
of Computing for more.

Okay, that was just a tiny introduction to the "nature of the universe". We asked some
questions, did some explorations, looked
at where answers might come from, and listed some methods of inquiry for (possibly) finding
answers.